Our True Purpose Is Only Understood By Looking Within

Felicia Mason

October 25, 1999|By FELICIA MASON Daily Press

Every person has a call on his or her life. Calls are generally associated with people who answer a call from God or a Higher Power to enter ministry or service. But everyone is called to do and to be something. Figuring out what that something might be is frequently the hard part.

Listening to or defining yourself by someone else's definition is guaranteed to lead you down a path of confusion and uncertainty, possibly even depression and anger. You have to know for yourself who you are, what you are and what you were called to be.

The world is full of examples of people who didn't begin to live full and productive lives until the second part of their natural lives. They answered the call of art or music, the written word or service to humanity. That's because sometimes it takes 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 years to figure out what this journey is supposed to be about.

Last week, on the way to looking for something else, I came across a speech I'd prepared and presented to a local group almost two years ago. The title "Called to the Sanctuary" made me pause as I rifled through files of papers. That sounded more like a sermon title than a topic for a motivational speech: "Sometimes we find sanctuary where we least expect it. From within. Confronting yourself, the man, woman or young person in the mirror, can be the most difficult task."

You can run but you can't hide, the old saying goes. That means you can fool a lot of people, but when you look at yourself, really look at yourself, when you examine your own heart and soul and place, the games have to stop.

Joyce Meyer, a Missouri-based evangelist whose "Life in the Word" radio and television programs air here, puts a similar thought this way: "It is time to stop running and begin to confront issues." People who run from issues usually find themselves confronting them again and again until they stop, assess and then learn and grow from the difficulty. "We never win a victory by running away," she says.

Teacher, healer, author and speaker Iyanla Vanzant tells people to "show up in your authentic self." That alone can be difficult for many who have been fooling themselves for so long that they no longer know who they are as individuals.

"Where you are is where you're supposed to be," Vanzant says.

And in an anecdote introducing "Five Stages of the Soul," Harry R. Moody tells a story of how man forgot his purpose and when he remembers it: We're all born knowing what our purpose in life is supposed to be. But the noises of life distract us from that mission. The purpose and the mission fades from our memories the further we get from birth. Then, one day, we wake up and remember and try to do something about it. Society, Moody says, generally calls this re-awakening a "mid-life crisis" because it comes somewhere between 35 and 55. Some people, he says, are able to redirect themselves onto the right path, the place they were meant to be all along. Others die bitter or disappointed, knowing the full and despairing meaning of "if only."

The bumps in the road -- the searches and the struggles -- aren't necessarily meant to slow us down. Sometimes they are there to jar our memories and consciousness.

Sometimes it takes a bump in the road for us to hear the wake-up call. The bump might be a setback, a separation, a job loss, a move or a death. But instead of embracing the pain, look for the rainbow.

There is one there. And so is the lesson you're supposed to learn from the experience.

Felicia Mason can be reached at 247-4776 or by e-mail at fmason@dailypress.com